THE "HAND OF GLORY"—LIABILITY OF COUNTRY DISTRICTS FOR ROBBERIES—EXEMPTION IN RESPECT OF SUNDAY TRAVELLING

Those far-distant, unpleasant days when "highway lawyers," and entirely unromantic bands of robbers, murderers, and footpads swarmed over the country, and robbed and slew with comparatively little fear of the law, were also extremely superstitious days. Good men and bad were alike steeped in a degrading belief in white and black magic, portents, and omens. Magical aids in the prosecution of both innocent and guilty enterprises were employed; and among them none more fearful than the charm known generally as the "Hand of Glory": the "open sesame" of thieves and assassins, among whom, it is to be feared, we must include not a few of our "romantic" highwaymen; although probably the larger number of them would actually have felt themselves insulted at being styled thieves, and certainly only a minority slew wilfully. Most desired nothing so little as to shed blood, in spite of the terrible alternative they threatened—"Your money, or your life!"

But among the thieves and the murderous the superstition of the "Hand of Glory" was widely prevalent. It appears to have originally derived from mediÆval Germany, that storehouse of terrible imaginings. What the "Hand of Glory" was, and the effect it produced, may be seen better by the following quotation from the Ingoldsby Legends, which is one of the most genuinely thrilling passages in literature. It is full of the most dreadful description, but exquisitely done:

The dried hand, thus obtained, was fitted with wicks, one to each finger and the thumb, made from the five locks of hair dipped in grease from the murderer's own body and the fat of a black tom cat, and generally consecrated with the saying of the Lord's Prayer, backwards. When all these wicks were lighted, and the blazing Hand of Glory carried into a house, a spell was supposed to be cast on place and inmates, in which the malefactor could work his will:

Traditions not so long since surviving in the North Riding of Yorkshire tell a horrid story of the use of an enchanted hand of this kind. One wild and bitter night—the sort of night when homeless wayfarers were more than usually to be pitied—a man clad in ragged clothes knocked at the door of a lone inn on a solitary moor, and asked for a lodging. There was no accommodation to spare, but as the night was so inclement and the way was long to the next house, he was told that if he liked, he might lie in the front of the kitchen fire. He accepted this offer with every appearance of thankfulness, and soon after, when the family had gone to bed, he was left there. But although the innkeeper and his family had retired and left the stranger alone, the servant was still engaged for a few minutes in another room which chanced to command a view of the kitchen. Happening to glance in that direction, she was at first astonished, and then horrified, to find that the stranger had risen up from the floor and had seated himself at the table where she saw him take a shrivelled, mummified hand from his pocket, set it up, and then, one by one, light the fingers. The girl rushed upstairs to warn her master of these extraordinary doings, but she found him and his family all already in a charmed sleep. It was impossible to arouse them; and here she found herself alone in the house with the evil-intentioned stranger and his uncanny movements. She quietly went downstairs again and saw the beggarman exploring the house and collecting articles that appeared to him worth taking. Still on the kitchen table burnt the four fingers of the Hand of Glory, in blue, sickly flames; but the thumb was not burning. To that fact was due the circumstance that one person in the house remained unaffected by the spell.

Stealing on noiseless feet into the kitchen, she blew upon the Hand, but could not blow it out. She poured beer over it, but the Hand only seemed to burn better. She tried water, but that appeared to have no effect, one way or the other. Then she emptied the milk-jug over it. Immediately the place was in darkness, except for the glow of the kitchen-fire. The spell was instantly removed, the sleepers awakened, and the robber seized and afterwards tried and hanged.

Harrison Ainsworth, revelling as always in the horrible, gives us his version of the Hand of Glory in Rookwood. In this variant you recognise the nastiness of it, rather than the horror:

The ancient condition of Merry England was a despotic rule tempered by rebellion and highway robbery, in which the Barons revolted from time to time against kingly encroachments, and the peasantry were generally at odds with both those estates. The woodland tracts that then overspread the greater part of the country were filled with outlaws, of whom Robin Hood, as we have already seen, was a sublimated idealisation, and in those tangled thickets a man, or a body of men, might lurk and exist for years, subsisting upon the deer whom it was then, under the old forest laws, mutilation and death to slay. But with the law already arrayed against them, the outlaws who had been deprived of the very few rights a man of the peasant class might then own, cared little for the fearful penalties that awaited those who took a fat buck and converted it into venison, and valued not at all the punishments that awaited the highway robber. A man proscribed for some offence, who had then taken to the woods of necessity, might even, for sheer love of the life, elect to remain in them for sport; for the sporting instinct has ever been deeply implanted in the character of the English race, without respect of class. It is largely the sporting instinct, and not so much the actual worth of the quarry, that makes the modern poacher brave the keepers of the squire's preserves.

It was but a step from specialising in unlawful chase of the deer to robbing travellers. The deer-stealers were already Ishmaels, before they had dared so greatly, and they were doubly outlawed after so boldly usurping the hunting prerogatives of kings and nobles. What mattered, then, the taking of a purse; nay, even of a life?

The Legislature early attempted to put pressure upon local authorities, to secure the arrest of robbers, and, as usual, the pressure was exercised through that most vulnerable part, the pocket, the "Achilles' heel" of civilisation. The country (often in later years we find it "the county") was supposed to be responsible for good governance, and if the country was unfortunate enough to be infested with robbers, it was expected to arrest them; or failing that, to be financially answerable for their robberies. We find this specifically provided for by Act of Parliament in 1285, and again in 1354.

But it was impossible in those times, in the sparsely populated country, to suppress robbers, and the rural districts suffered severely in pocket as a result of bold pillaging in the day-time.

In 1509 Margaret Paston, writing from Norfolk, is found nervous of sending gold to London, and telling her husband, then staying in town, that a sum of twenty marks had been paid for a ward, but that the person who paid it "dare not aventure her money to be brought up to London for feere of robbyng; for it is seide heere that there goothe many thefys be twyx this and London." He was therefore to have the money at his coming home.

The county division known as "the hundred" was the area responsible and liable to reimburse losses occasioned in this manner. Thus, inter alia, we find the Hundred of Benhurst, in Berkshire, continually assessed to make good the losses sustained by travellers, along what is now the Bath Road, through Maidenhead Thicket, a place whose ill repute was second only to that of Hounslow Heath. By an Act of Parliament of 1585 (27 Elizabeth c. 13, s. 2) the sum recoverable from the hundreds was limited to half the travellers' loss. The reasons given for this limitation were the distress and impoverishment of the inhabitants by reason of these frequent and severe levies upon their purses. It is evidence of the extraordinary increase of highway robbery at that period. Five years after this enactment, the Hundred of Benhurst paid £255 compensation for robberies committed in the Thicket.

Even so, the liability of the country, the county, or the hundred, had always been limited to robberies committed in daylight. "Between sun and sun," i.e. between the setting of the sun and the next morning's sunrise, the highwaymen might work double tides and plunder as they would, and no action for damages would lie against the inhabitants.

Nor could travellers who were robbed on Sunday have any redress. It was particularly enacted by the statute of 1676, known as the Sunday Trading Act, that any one travelling on the Lord's Day did so entirely at his own risk, and was barred from bringing an action. "But nevertheless," the section continues, "the inhabitants of the counties and hundreds (after notice of such robbery to them, or some of them, given, or after hue-and-cry for the same to be brought) shall make or cause to be made fresh suit and pursuit after the offenders, with horsemen and footmen, according to the statute made in the twenty-seventh year of Queen Elizabeth, upon pain of forfeiting to the King's Majesty, his heirs and successors, as much money as might have been recovered against the hundred by the party robbed, if this had not been made."